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T-Mobile USA

T-Mobile USA, Inc. is the U.S. wireless operation of Deutsche Telekom AG, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, with nearly 130 million customers worldwide.

Consumers are constantly demanding changes like new rate plans, value-add services, better connectivity, and popular mobile applications. At the same time, the volume of traffic that smart phones and mobile apps are generating is rising exponentially.

T-Mobile USA

T-Mobile USA, Inc. is the U.S. wireless operation of Deutsche Telekom AG, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, with nearly 130 million customers worldwide.

Consumers are constantly demanding changes like new rate plans, value-add services, better connectivity, and popular mobile applications. At the same time, the volume of traffic that smart phones and mobile apps are generating is rising exponentially.

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From a T-Mobile middleware perspective, launching a new platform, like our highly regarded Android application, is quick and simple because TIBCO products allow us to quickly develop the components that need to be created, and integrate them with the large number that have already been built.

Faster Innovation Made Possible with Seamless Integration and Unrelenting System Availability

The Company

Based in Bellevue, Washington, T-Mobile USA, Inc. is the U.S. wireless operation of Deutsche Telekom AG. By the end of the third quarter of 2012, approximately 131 million mobile customers were served by the mobile communication segments of the Deutsche Telekom group — 33.3 million by T-Mobile USA — all via a common technology platform based on GSM, UMTS, and HSPA+ 21/HSPA+ 42. T-Mobile USA’s innovative wireless products and services help people connect to those who matter most.

Challenge

The rapid pace of change in the telecom industry presents a major challenge to the wireless providers. Consumers are constantly demanding changes like new rate plans, value-add services, better connectivity, and popular mobile applications. Throughout the industry, companies fight to keep up with the expectations of customers. As applications on mobile devices become richer and begin to generate more data, T-Mobile strives to be at the forefront of change. Consumers expect to see updated data in their apps the moment they open the phones, which necessitates automatic updating of data and faster transmission speeds. The sheer volume of traffic that smart phones and mobile apps generate is going up exponentially. By adopting the right technologies, T-Mobile wants to provide exemplary service and connectivity to its customers.

Solution

T-Mobile first started using TIBCO back in 2004, handling about five million transactions a day with 20 systems integrated through shared information. Currently, T-Mobile is handling about 60 million transactions per day via TIBCO, which translates to over three billion messages being passed through the various components in the process flow. There are a hundred systems talking to each other seamlessly, massively expanding the exchange of data across systems. TIBCO is at the core of this transformation, allowing T-Mobile to address and anticipate the increasing volume of transactions while improving system stability over time. Back in 2004, the company was hitting about 98 percent system availability, which still left too much downtime. Now, it is close to five nines, 99.999 percent, resulting in very little downtime.

Benefits

One of the benefits of the integration solution was being able to build reusable services. For example, “when T-Mobile has a new platform that wants to gather information for the customers, (something like the app on the Android handsets) building that was quick because almost everything we needed, we had already built”, says Mark Johnston, Manager, Middleware Space and Application Support, T-Mobile USA, Inc. “We just needed to build a new framework to talk to those systems that required minor changes. If we had been going with an old-school approach, we would have had to code it from top to bottom from scratch.” TIBCO enables T-Mobile to rapidly bring innovation to the market.

Business users at T-Mobile have seen benefits from TIBCO, even if they don’t know TIBCO is responsible for the quick responses they get for the information they need. When T-Mobile has new innovations they want to bring out, they are able to add them much faster than would have been possible otherwise. On top of that, T-Mobile delivers these benefits using a very stable system environment, another benefit of using TIBCO.

Future

T-Mobile is moving towards smaller, horizontally scalable boxes and systems. This is where TIBCO’s cloud computing solution, TIBCO Silver ®, is really ideal. T-Mobile is exploring the value of adding TIBCO Silver to right size environments to handle loads that fluctuate from small to the biggest possible.